Vern Brownell

Chief Executive Officer
D-Wave Systems Inc., Canada

Vern Brownell is the CEO of D-Wave Systems, the world’s first quantum computing company, and is a highly regarded thought leader in enterprise and data technology. His vision of a virtualized datacenter back in the late 1990s led him to found and run Egenera, a pioneer in infrastructure virtualization. Prior to founding Egenera, Vern was Chief Technology Officer at Goldman Sachs, where he and his staff of 1,300 were responsible for worldwide technology infrastructure, including computing platforms, datacenters, data networking, telecommunications and trading-floor operations. Since joining D-Wave in 2009, he led the company through its first customer sales to Lockheed Martin and Google, oversaw the development and commercialization of several generations of D-Wave technology.

Vern has also held various management and engineering roles at Stratus Computer, Ztel and Digital Equipment. He holds an MBA degree from Anna Maria College and a BEng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.